In his column in today's Washington Post entitled Return to Grant Park Harold Meyerson takes note of the place of Grant Park in Chicago as the place where it will happen on Tuesday. Not like 40 years ago though.
The Democratic Party will return next Tuesday night to the place where, 40 years ago, its last governing coalition ingloriously died -- in all likelihood, to proclaim its rebirth... the choice of Grant Park is also historically -- even poetically -- resonant. For it was in Grant Park on a hot summer night during the tumultuous 1968 Democratic convention that the New Deal era in American politics was dispatched to oblivion through the efforts of antiwar demonstrators and the Chicago police, whose conduct that evening a subsequent government report termed "a police riot."
Meyerson attributes the collapse of the coalition to four factors thar persist into this campaign. Let us examine this further below the break.
Meyerson names these factors: Great Society programs began to cost the party the support of working- and middle-class whites. Lyndon Johnson's civil rights legislation moved the white South into the Republican Party. The war in Vietnam split the party's hawks and doves. The rise of libertarian youth culture estranged yet another group.
In short, the New Deal coalition that had governed since 1933 was already falling apart, but the conflicts became explosive and irreconcilable at that Democratic convention. Speaking from the convention's podium, Connecticut Democratic Sen. Abe Ribicoff, referring to police violence earlier that night, accused Democratic Mayor Richard Daley's police force of employing "Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago."
Richard Nixon's strategists moved quickly to exploit the Democrats' implosion. The young Kevin Phillips argued for a "Southern strategy" whereby the GOP could win the allegiance of previously Democratic whites by stressing culturally traditionalist and militaristic themes. Indeed, since the ascent of Newt Gingrich to the House speakership in 1995, and reinforced by George W. Bush's election eight years ago, the Republicans have been -- by virtue of their embrace of anti-government, hawkish and culturally parochial perspectives -- a predominantly Southern party.
It is easy to mix cause and effect in complex situations like this. The civil rights movement's timing relative to the Vietnam War will forever prevent a clean causal analysis of these changes.
It is amusing that the word "socialist" is being misused over and over again in at least two contexts during this campaign, namely the use of government funds for the bank bail out and the misconception of changes in taxation policy by Obama. Things were much clearer then when Michael Harrington, the co-founder of the Democratic Socialists of America was openly able to influence JFK's social policies.
Absent a governing New Deal coalition, the mixed economy the New Deal made, where unions balanced corporations and the government provided a safety net, has substantially eroded. Now, reenter, stage center-left, the Democrats.
Barack Obama was 7 when his political party-to-be blew apart in the streets of Chicago. He had no role in its internecine wars. But he clearly understands, as the Nixonians of '68 understood, how to assemble a new governing coalition on the ashes of the old.
The primary goal of Obama's new-model Democrats is to implement a 21st-century version of Franklin Roosevelt's reforms. Obama aims to regulate a financial system whose excesses have dragged down the economy, to re-knit a tattered safety net by greatly expanding access to health insurance, and to provide public investment at a time when private investment is lagging by jump-starting an alternative energy industry -- which could make the nation more globally competitive and reduce its gargantuan carbon footprint. None of these priorities divides the Democrats, or the nation, along the regional or racial lines that proved so divisive in the '60s. Like Roosevelt's policies, they are universal in scope. And Obama's coalition, by virtue of its multiracial character -- and leader -- is more universalistic than FDR's ever was.
Should he win next Tuesday, Obama will proclaim the birth of this new era on the very ground that Roosevelt's coalition split apart. The symbolism is worthy of an epic poet. After 40 years in the desert, the Democrats will have come home.
So have things gone full circle? Not really. The context is very different now. The Cold War is over and those other guys are the boogey men. But that "threat" has seemed to have lost its influence as it stands in the shadow of globalization, economics running out of luck after all these years of false ideological justifications, the reality of the fact that we have fouled our nest and used up so much of our resources to do it as quickly as possible. No, the illusion of circularity is the projection of a spiral in hyperspace. We will not do what FDR did without discarding some very obsolete tools and ideas. Are we ready for the 21st century?